Deena Goldstone - Surprise Me

He shakes his head, then opens the door wider. “You want some coffee?”

She doesn’t. She wants to go. This was a terrible idea, but she finds herself saying, “Sure.” Trapped again by indecision, by her inability to state what she’d like, she finds herself closing the front door behind her. She sees his retreating back off to the left, entering a room she assumes is the kitchen. He hasn’t said another word but she follows him.

In the kitchen, he’s pouring two cups of coffee from a large, old-fashioned metal percolator which sits on a very dirty stove.

“You take sugar? Or milk? I may have some in the fridge.”

She shakes her head, and he hands her an orange mug with the Chandler coyote on it, drawn in cartoon style, faintly reminiscent of Wile E. Coyote. He sits down at the large kitchen table and she sits opposite him.

He pulls the Levine book out of its brown paper bag as she sips her coffee and avoids eye contact with him. Her note is stuck in the book, and he finds it and reads it while she surveys the dirty dishes in the sink. Several days’ worth, it looks like.

“Yes,” he says simply in answer to the question on her card— Can we start over? — and now she can take a breath and look at him. When she does, he’s smiling.

“I was sure you’d had enough of me,” he says.

She shakes her head.

“Well, I’m relieved,” he tells her.

“Me, too.”

He lays the small book of poems gently on the wooden table between them and attempts to give her the gift of Levine’s wisdom. “What Philip Levine taught me is that what you’ve lived, what’s inside you, is worthy enough to write about. You need to believe that.” And then he says her name, “Isabelle,” with so much tenderness in his voice that it sounds like a prayer.

“Can I do it?” They’re looking at each other now, across the table.

He nods.

“But do I have something to say?”

“I think so.”

“Will you help me?” she finds herself saying.

He bows his head over his large hands, wrapped tightly now around his ceramic mug. He doesn’t want her to see his face, to detect in it the struggle going on to remain steady. That this girl believes he can do it despite the wreck she must see in front of her. That she trusts what he doesn’t even trust about himself.

“Yes,” he says finally, and only then can he look up into her expectant, hopeful, very young face.

—

ON THE NEXT TUESDAY it’s as if they’ve crossed some invisible bridge. The air is clearer on the other side. More supple. There’s laughter, even.

During the previous week as Isabelle worked, her spirit grew lighter. She tried more things, took some risks, and she suspects her writing got better. Daniel said I can do this, she told herself whenever her nerve failed, and his belief in her led her forward.

When she walks into his office at ten o’clock, eager, even excited, she holds two sets of the rewritten pages, the end of Chapter One again. One for him and the other for her. The plan is to read aloud as he follows along. That way, she tells him, they can hear the words together.

She paces as she reads, and Daniel finds it hard work to follow the words. He’s drawn to watch her cross and recross the worn floor of his office. She’s performing for him, and he appreciates it.

He likes these pages better, he tells her. Maybe it’s because she’s reading them to him. He tells her that, as well.

“You’ve got an unfair advantage,” he says. “You read well.”

“Part of my plan.” She’s still walking around his office, not able to light anywhere.

“To do what?”

“Bring you over to my side,” she tells him in an offhand way, gently teasing. They both feel so relieved today. So glad to find themselves in this uncomfortable office, so comfortable with each other.

“Isabelle, can’t you tell by now? I am by your side and on your side. Don’t you know?”

“I do,” she tells him as she stops pacing and looks directly at him. “I know.”

And that’s enough for his face to fold into a grin. “And you know I’m going to reread these pages later tonight, alone, by myself, to see what I think of them then.”

“But you’ll hear my voice in your head as you do.”

“Probably,” he admits. Then: “You stay with me.”

You stay with me, too, immediately leaps into Isabelle’s mind, but all she says is, “I hope so.”

—

LATER THAT NIGHT, he does just that — he rereads her latest pages. The house is quiet. Stefan is out somewhere. He often leaves without telling Daniel where he’s going, and Daniel doesn’t ask. His son is twenty-three. It’s not Daniel’s job to ride herd on him. What his job exactly is in terms of his son, Daniel hasn’t quite figured out.

Outside the small sunroom, the backyard is full of darkness, and with the one small table lamp alight beside him, the room feels cozy and cocooned.

As Daniel reads, he of course hears Isabelle’s voice reading the words and sees her striding around his campus office with some kind of newly acquired confidence. Did he give her that? Maybe. But how? Another one of those mysteries that Daniel accepts without questioning, as he accepted his writing gift when it came and mourned when it left him.

The pages are verification — they’re better than any she’s given him. He relaxes into the old-fashioned wing chair, his head resting against the high back, and sees his image reflected back to him in the glass walls of the room. He’s grinning stupidly. The girl is learning. Somehow he is teaching. Amazing, an outcome he never expected.

When Stefan comes home sometime after midnight, he finds his father fast asleep in his chair, his jaw drooping open, snoring slightly, Isabelle’s pages spread across his lap. He looks pathetic, Stefan thinks, like some kind of old guy.

“Dad…”

Daniel doesn’t stir.

“Dad,” Stefan says much louder, but that doesn’t wake him, either. He has to walk into the room, shake his father’s shoulder, and finally Daniel rouses.

“You oughta be in bed.”

Daniel mumbles something that sounds like “shit.” He’s half asleep as he pushes himself up from the chair, Isabelle’s pages floating from his lap to the floor like settling birds. Stefan kneels and picks them up.

“These that girl’s? The one I met in the hall?”

“Isabelle,” Daniel says as he makes his way out of the room, his hips tight and aching from hours of sleeping upright.

“Are they any good?”

“Finally, yes.”

“I told her not to work with you,” Stefan says to his father’s retreating back, and that stops Daniel. He turns around so that Stefan will hear him clearly.

“Well, you were wrong. She should very much work with me.”

During the spring months, Isabelle lives with a constant commotion inside her head. She carries on conversations with Melanie and her other characters, sometimes arguing with them, often rewriting dialogue or even paragraphs of prose. The process feels as though she is running a low-grade fever, just enough to make her normal reality seem glassy and unreal. It doesn’t matter. All Isabelle cares about is the world she is creating with her words, the one she shares with Daniel. Everything else falls away. Waking up, eating, sleeping, are only valuable because they enable her to write and then deliver those pages to Daniel on Tuesday mornings.

One hour a week, and yet each week whatever occurs in that room sustains her, pushes her, and finally rewards her. She doesn’t stop to examine the mechanics of how that happens. She only knows the whole transaction feels private, her words almost a transfer of a secret language that only Daniel will be able to decipher. Pure in a way nothing else in her life has ever been.